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January 02, 2017

My wife, Glenda, and I have enjoyed an adventurous life and it all started back in 1973. On August 5, 1973, this article written by Jerry Bledsoe was published in the Mount Airy Times where our good friend, RJ Berrier, was editor. It is interesting to look back on the article after over 43 years have passed. Many of the actual details of our adventures can be filled in by our books, especially A Taste for the Wild - Canada's Maritimes. There you can find out the story of why we did not end up living in Newfoundland. Some pictures of our time in Nova Scotia are available in this album and additional pictures of our over ten years on the farm in New Brunswick are in this album. More memories from our time in Canada can be found at this website, The Canada I Miss. Here is Mr. Bledsoe's article with some of the errors from the original article corrected.

They'll Start Their New Life By Pioneering In A New Land

Glenda Haymore smiled.

"I've really led a very sheltered life," she said.

Glenda Haymore is 24, bright and attractive. She studied child development at UNC-G, and since she graduated two years ago, she has been working in the university's demonstration nursery and living in a modern new apartment at Guilford College. If you'd told her a couple of months ago that she would suddenly give this up to tend cows in 40-below Canadian winters, she might well have laughed at you.

But, of course, she hadn't reckoned with David Sobotta then.

Like Glenda, David Sobotta is 24 and very bright. They are both from Mount Airy, although they had not met each other until June 9. But when they did meet...

"Well, it was just one of those magical things," a friend of Glenda has said.

That, however, is getting a bit ahead of the story.

David Sobotta went away to study history at Harvard. A lot of people, especially his parents, assumed that he would go on to law school and become a Harvard lawyer. "Everyone had sort of intended for me to be a lawyer," he said. "I never did think about it."

He had been thinking about something far removed from that, in fact. Instead of wrestling with law books and lawyers, David Sobotta was thinking of a more basic challenge. Man again nature. That sort of thing.

Finally Decided on Nova Scotia

In his last two years of college, he had started looking for some land. He wanted to make sure that it was well away from the centers of civilization, and he began his search in the Northwest, then went on up into Alaska. But the place he finally decided on was Nova Scotia. It was a beautiful place, and he had found 340 acres with a 200-year-old shingled house on the Bay of Fundy that he could get cheap. He bought it as soon he graduated from college and stunned his family by telling that he was going to be a Canadian farmer instead of a Harvard lawyer.

Three friends from college went with him to work the place at first. Two did not last long. The third married the village school teacher, settled down across the road from his farm and still helps him with it.

The plan was to raise cattle (he has 150 acres of pasture), but after he bought the farm equipment that he had to have, he only had enough money for seven cattle. There are now several more and he has made enough money to pay some taxes. "Fortunately it doesn't take a lot of money to live in Nova Scotia," he says.

He has learned a lot in the last two years. With help from his friends he ripped out the insides of the old house and started to restore it. He has put up hay for his cattle, grown vegetables and put them up for his larder, raised pigs, butchered them and cured the meat, butchered a steer and even netted herring to salt away for winter. Until he went to Nova Scotia, he'd never had any experience with anything like that.

"We pretty much learned as we went along from the neighbors," he says. "They're friendly people."

There aren't a lot of neighbors of course. David figures maybe 12 or 15 within three miles of his place. But then his farm in St. Croix Cove, is only about 10 miles from Bridgetown which has about 1,500 people.

"We aren't isolated from the world," David was saying.

"Just about," said Glenda, barely audible.

"I was just teasing," she said quickly.

"After all," he said the nearest grocery store is only 10 miles away."

If you are thinking that Glenda may have a vested interest in this place, you are right. In early June, David went to Massachusetts for a friend's wedding and decided to come home to visit for a week. His mother told him that she knew this nice girl, Glenda Haymore, she wanted him to meet, and he said, well sure.

They had lobsters for dinner, and they got to talking about David's place, and later he showed her slides, and they both knew right away. It took them only four days to make the decision. They were going to get married.

Just-To-Make-Sure Trip

In early July, Glenda went to Nova Scotia to look over the place, a sort of just-to-make-sure trip. After all, as she said, she'd led a sheltered life. Nothing in her experience had prepared her to do battle with the elements. But the place was beautiful and captivating and she was convinced.

Their wedding was at 2 p.m. Saturday at Holly Springs Baptist Church in Mount Airy. They planned to leave immediately after the ceremony for Nova Scotia.

The Friday night before the wedding they sat in Glenda's old apartment awaiting the arrival at the airport of David's friend from across the road in Nova Scotia, and talking about their plans for the future. Those plans may include moving on from their place in Nova Scotia, although they have no current plans for selling it. David has worked too hard on it, especially on the house, to get rid of it quickly, and besides, the value of the land has already doubled since he bought it and maybe even tripled.

But David has it in his mind that he would like to pioneer a little and anyway, it's getting a little crowded for him in Nova Scotia. He'd like to go up to Newfoundland and homestead in virgin territory, build a house and clear the land and make it produce. Why"

"Oh, just sort of a challenge." He paused. "Even fewer people." And he looked at Glenda and smiled. "We haven't really made that decision yet."

"All I had to promise," she said, "was that I'd go and look at Newfoundland at least twice. Give it a chance."

November 04, 2016

This is the twelfth anniversary of my first post on View from the Mountain. I no longer live on a mountain. I spend my free time walking the edges of Raymond's Gut marsh pictured in the post. It is just off a large coastal river that is part of North Carolina's Crystal Coast.

Our mountaintop provided plenty of inspiration but it was not the reason that I spent time sharing my thoughts. Today as in the past I write because putting words together helps me understand my interaction with the world around me. I never hide from my own words and sometimes I am lucky enough to learn that perhaps I said something that helped someone over a hurdle. Most of all, my words help me remember my place in the universe. I never forget that the marsh like the world or the universe can quickly consume you if you are not careful. I am grateful to live in a beautiful area that inspires me as much as the mountains once did.

The following words are adapted from a post that I did over ten years ago. Somehow they are very appropriate in the closing days of the 2016 presidential election. I was surprised how relevant the decade-old words are today....

I think we often get too caught up in the concept of independence. "Freedom from control or influence of another or others" does not mean that we should not take seriously our responsibility to others. In fact the only way we can truly remain independent is through the help of others.

What has made this country strong is that fabric of friendship, mutual respect, and cooperation between neighbors. That fabric of society was easier to find and nurture in rural societies, but I know from living in small towns like Mount Airy, NC that a city street does not preclude you from having great neighbors with shared interests and values. Here in suburbs and subdivisions of the South, you will still find that great feeling of being able to count on your neighbors as friends. As I read the stories bemoaning the loss of friends in modern society, I feel really sad for people who have no one to confide in but a radio talk show host. I am glad that I am not in their shoes.

We may not have any family where we live but we have lots of friends that are almost as close as family. Our real family is not so far away that we cannot get in a car and go for an overnight visit. While some are complaining about electronic communications destroying friendships, I would argue otherwise. I talk to friends by email or instant messaging every day. I would likely never find the time to send them a written letter. Are we closer because of it? I would answer yes. Then there is the self selecting group of friends that I have found on the Internet. We share some common values, and actually I have found some enduring friendships that started on the Internet.

Yet I do think we have become a society where many are absorbed by their own self importance. I see it in little things which individually mean almost nothing, but when taken together they show that we need to refocus on the people around us and not just what is good for us individually.

I see people cruising in the left lane of the highway completely oblivious to the line of traffic building up behind them or those who run a red light because their time is more important than the lives of others. Then there are people who can only see how something will impact them not how it will help someone else. They refuse to see another point of view, the big picture, or how the other guy will be hurt because of their selfishness. That's not the way our country was built, but it is something that threatens to tear up our great country.

A few years ago, a friend died. I did not have the opportunity to say good bye to that friend. It caused me to recommit to finding people who had been important in my life. I have made a few car trips to Ronceverte, WV, because that is the only way to visit with my high school Latin teacher who has yet to go beyond the telephone in the world of electronics. We continue to make trips to Mount Airy, NC and Yadkin County, NC just to visit friends and family. We cannot spend lots of time with them, but we do keep that web of friendship and family alive. Sharing our lives with others has given us strength to do things we never would have done by ourselves.

It is the same way with our country. We gain strength from each other, especially when we help each other. When someone tries to tear down another person because they do not agree with them, they are hurting more than just one person. Their attacks weaken that web of interdependence which independence has given us the freedom to create.

I am glad we have the independence and freedom to be interdependent.

My first lessons came from family, church, and Boy Scouts. Failure was not an option because I would have been letting down those who gave so much for me just to have the opportunities that so many others never had. That drive to succeed got me through military school at McCallie, some turbulent years at Harvard and over a decade of farming in the spruce covered hills of Canada.

Somehow the people I met along the way and the lessons I learned prepared me well for an even tougher journey in Apple's corporate swamp. Even there I found great friends. As my wife is fond of saying, there are good people everywhere, you just have to find them. I have never stopped looking for the good people because without the help of all those wonderful, caring people throughout my life, my independence would not have gotten me very far.

We all have different skills as I used to tell my team at Apple, the challenge is finding how we can use those different strengths to be successful together.

September 23, 2016

There are parts of your life and people that have a huge impact on the person that you become.

I remain proud that I was a Boy Scout when growing up. After many years I also can look back on my years in military school at McCallie with fondness. The McCallie motto of Honor, Truth, and Duty has been as much a part of my being as Harvard's motto of Veritas (Truth). My years at Harvard were a time when our country seemed to be ripping apart at the seams, but I remain convinced that our country's foundations handled the challenge of the sixties and seventies without breaking and were stronger after all the turmoil.

It used to be a joke in our family that my mother would give a friend or family member almost anything that they asked for that she had. She was never one for letting things be stuffed away unused in the attic or even under-used somewhere in the house. She was always happy when useful homes were found for things in storage. Life was for living and accumulating stuff was not part of her plan for happiness. Mother was also not very forgiving about donations that were wasted. My father once gave the Mount Airy YMCA a $20,000 donation. They used the money for a parking lot and mother thought they could have done much more with the money. She never forgot or forgave them.

Considering my background, perhaps it is not too surprising that I became disenchanted with politics in the early seventies. It was a time of assassinations and Watergate. It was also a time when I felt like that I did not know myself. I took a chance and went off to Canada. With $6,000 from my mother, I bought a home and farm on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. My father helped with a few thousand for a farm tractor and some equipment and I went back to the land for three years. There were a few cows, two Labrador retrievers, tons of hay and lots of gardening. Of necessity I learned to do almost everything from copper plumbing to electrical wiring and building cabinets.

About two years into my back to the land experiment, I made a trip down to the states to help a college roommate get married just outside of Boston. From there I wandered down to Washington to visit a college friend. The trip to Washington convinced me I had made the right decision to move to Canada. After Washington I headed down to Mount Airy where my mother was living. With the help of a blind date, I was smitten and ended up marrying a wonderful North Carolina lady a few months latter. I convinced her to come back to Nova Scotia with me.

Once there is someone else in your life, it is impossible not to think about others. In 1974, my wife, our two retrievers, the tractor, several cats and all our belongings moved to a farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. There I learned almost everything I had not learned in Nova Scotia. While more cattle came first (eventually the herd numbered 200 Angus), the children showed up within a few years. Our three children had the most impact on my worldview. It is impossible to have children and not care about the world where they will grow up. With children you get involved with all sorts of things like Sunday school, Brownies, Cub Scouts, soccer, hockey, and even schools especially when they are threatened.

Our children in the end were what brought us back to the United States. Even after we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia and I went to work for Apple, we still loved living in Canada. We had great friends and enjoyed the relative tranquility of Canada. I still remember the story of the one bank robbery that we had in the small town of Stanley that was near our farm. The bank robber came in and was told the safe was on a timer and he would have to wait for it to open. The teller asked him if he would like a cup of tea and being Canadian he said yes. The teller made the tea, called the RCMP, and after the robber finished his tea and left with the money, he was picked up on the one road that led out of town. We left Canada not because of Canada but because we thought our children would have better opportunities in the States.

We first moved to Columbia, Maryland, but quickly figured out that we needed a place closer to our roots so within a couple of years we were living on the side of a mountain in Roanoke, Virginia. There in the Roanoke Valley we found a great Presbyterian Church (to match my years in a Presbyterian military school), wonderful schools, and friends that still delight us. Still my Apple job was a pressure cooker and the little time that I had was often dedicated to family and staying sane. In 2000 my mother moved in with us in Roanoke and we became part of the sandwich generation.

By 2006, my mother had passed away and I was gone from Apple and its unethical culture. That year we found a new place to heal from the wounds of the corporate world. The Crystal Coast has been a dream place to be, and as the pressures of work eased up after my departure from Apple, I was able to start volunteering to help others on a consistent basis instead of just being a good Samaritan when I cleaned their driveways with a snowblower, helped dig graves, or pulled folks out of snow drifts. I learned a lot in my three years as a Presbyterian elder and still feel great peace from our church family. However, the last year of my three years as an HOA board member made me feel like I was back in the seventies. It has not made me want to move back to the cold winters of Canada.

While I am just as disenchanted with the problematic HOA board that took over from our team as I was with our government back in the days of Watergate, I do not feel as helpless. With the skills that I learned over many years, I know the problem can be fixed and it is just a matter of time before things will be back to normal. It will take work and a thick skin but with others standing shoulder to shoulder with me, the problem while troubling is manageable. Long ago I learned that you cannot let others hijack your institutions for their own benefit. There are times you have to stand for what you believe. I take great pleasure in knowing that many others are already standing with me and rooting for our success.

Much of what people seem to learn today is that everything goes especially if it makes their own tiny life better. Even when they make many others miserable in the process, it is justifiable because they benefit. The selfishness that drives many of these people makes no sense and I often wonder how they even sleep at night.

Only as people understand that promoting the greater good helps us all will we make true progress. Sacrificing a little of yourself for others is a grand American tradition that has been lost in much of the business culture of this country. We need to bring it back and refuse to elevate those whose only goal is success on the backs of others.

May 20, 2016

There are lots of reasons to like living in the South. Today's lunch is a perfect example. Where else but the South is mac and cheese considered a vegetable? Then there is my barbecue sandwich. Last night we went out to dinner. It was a little over twenty dollars for my wife and myself, but the meal, mine was barbecue and fried chicken, was such a bargain (Fat Fellas, Newport, NC) that we brought home enough barbecue that we had plenty for sandwiches today.

Food is just the icing on the cake for those of us living far from the snow belt country. One of the neatest things about the people here is that it takes almost nothing to get people talking. You can strike up a conversation almost anywhere and most times people enjoy sharing their lives, the best of their area and tips on what to do and where to go. If you go to most big cities people stare at the ground or at their smartphones. Now we have plenty of smartphone users here but if you get out of the urban areas, you will often find that people use them more for sharing pictures of their families than they do texting or calling.

Then there is the climate. As I have heard many times before, no one moves north to retire. That is undoubtedly true but brings some problems since there are a few folks from the North who have a hard time adjusting to the South. I like to blame the gate in our subdivision on folks from far away who have no idea how insane it is to have a gate on subdivision with pine forests and cornfields as neighbors and a river bordering another side. Still most of the folks from away get with the program and learn some of the Southern graces.

With the climate comes the opportunity to grow lots of things. We manage to grow something almost year round in our garden. We planted Swiss chard last fall, we are still eating off of it and will likely continue to do so through the summer until we plant some more next fall. We picked our last ripe large tomato on December 27 this past year. We finally picked the last of our ripe and green cherry tomatoes on January 17. It was just before the first really hard frost. We have finally finished six weeks of marathon lettuce eating and sharing. Our two four packs of Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce yielded thirty-one heads. We ate lettuce two meals a day for weeks. When our lettuce finally ran out, we had given away close to half of it and were excited that another neighbor brought us some red leaf lettuce. We had ripe strawberries the first week in April. Just how quickly do ripe strawberries remove any thoughts of what passes for winter down here? If we get some warm weather soon, we will be swamped with homegrown tomatoes by early June. Eventually we will need to find homes for the tasty, deep red tomatoes that count as a complete meal here if you just add Duke's mayonnaise, salt, pepper and bread.

Sharing is another part of life in the South. I have to add that in any farming area, New England, Maritime Canada, and the rest of the US and Canada, sharing is built into farming communities. However, because the South is still close to its rural roots, you find many people who go out of their way to share. The shared bounty could be an extra pumpkin for a pie, some bulbs to plant for spring color, a mess of collards, a fresh spring cabbage, spare tomato plants, a bucket of pecans or whatever people have to give. Folks on our home turf do not want things to go to waste. If they have something that you can use, generally they are happy for you to use it.

Then there is advice. There is a Southern way of giving advice and it is perhaps a kinder, gentler way of offering suggestions. People are willing to show you how they have done something whether it is planting, building, making crafts, baking or cooking. People here in the South are generous with their knowledge and often go out of their way to share what they have learned.

Next there is neighborliness. Again that is something you will find in almost any rural community but it is still widely present in the real South. People want to be good neighbors and will put up with a lot just to remain on good terms. Unless you are living next door to a transplant that did not take when planted in Southern soil, you will not have any trouble getting someone to watch your house like it is their own when you travel or help you out in any emergency.

A special part of life are the church families in the South that reach out with open arms to everyone. There is little danger of not being able to find a compatible church home in the much of the South. We have churches for every taste and imagination. Often there is food involved, sometimes even northern Lobsters. When my wife broke her ankle checking on a neighbor's cat in Roanoke, Virginia, I finally had to tell her to have the ladies of the church back off because we had run out of refrigerator room.

Finally there is reverence and respect. You will still find Southern people who try to pull off to the side of the road to let a funeral procession pass. I will never forget the funeral of RJ Berrier, my longtime friend, and former newsman from Mount Airy, North Carolina. As we rode through the streets of Mount Airy, we found a police car at every intersection. In front of each car stood a policeman with his hat over his heart. RJ had been a part of many lives. He wrote for many people their birth announcements, the notice when they had graduated from high school, and their obituary when they died.

I know North Carolina is going through a tough time being the national spotlight for the wrong reasons. It pains me to see some of our out-of -touch politicians and governor going to great lengths to make life miserable for a few people who have had a tough time living in their own skins. In my humble opinion, I would rather share a bathroom with a transgender person than someone who voted for HB2.

Life in the South is not perfect, but it is a little like what I have heard about democracy. It beats all the alternatives.

May 21, 2015

This is my second Acura MDX and with over 115,000 miles on it, it has seen plenty of challenges. My first MDX helped clean out my mother's home in Mount Airy, North Carolina. There seemed to always be some furniture riding up Interstate 81 with us to Roanoke, Virginia or even to Reston, Virginia where a couple of our children live. When we moved from Roanoke in 2012, the Acura made several trips to the coast fully loaded mostly with very heavy hand tools left over from our years on the farm.

In 2012 we sold our big Nissan truck. We were driving it less than 3,500 miles a year and it hardly made sense to keep a vehicle we were driving so little. I decided to put a hitch for my boat on my MDX and make do with it. The hauling chores for the Acura have gotten more and more interesting. I keep a tarp in it almost all of the time.

Usually in spring and fall, there are at least a couple of trips for sod. Then there are bags of mulch and dirt that we use in our gardening. Last year I took my tarp into the woods and raked pine straw on it and dragged it to the Acura, then hauled it home and dragged the tarp to the beds on the far side of yard where I spread the pine straw with a pitch fork. It was very similar to feeding the loose hay that we sometimes had on our farm in Canada.

This year the pine straw was not so good in the woods so I bought bales of long leaf pine straw from the home improvement stores. I made three trips nearly fully loaded with 10-15 bales each trip. After that I ended up giving our palms a haircut and hauled the palm fronds away to the dump.

Our MDX also pulls my kayak up the slope and out of the water behind our home. I have had a lot of vehicles over my life but I do not think I have every had one more versatile. Usually it has a cooler or two bouncing around in it.

Certainly my Acura MDX is not a luxury vehicle dedicated to cruising to school and picking up groceries, but it is a faithful companion and has helped bring home its fair share of the sea's bounty.